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Below are Quotations About the Subject:Values

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All around us there is a breakdown of values [...] It is not just the [...] overpowering greed that pervades our business life. It is the fact that we are not willing to sacrifice for the ethics and values we profess. For an ethic is not an ethic, and a value not a value without some sacrifice to it. Something given up, something not taken, something not gained.

When loyalty conflicts with honesty, when fairness conflicts with pragmatism, or when social responsibility conflicts with obligation to shareholders, people become conflicted. And when their actions are inconsistent with their values, they either experience guilt, anger and embarrassment. People try to minimize such cognitive dissonance by rationalizing or even denying their behavior, discounting the consequences of it or simply blaming others.

Any organization, in order to survive and achieve success, must have a sound set of beliefs on which it premises all its policies and actions…. Beliefs must always come before policies, practices, and goals. The latter must always be altered if they are seen to violate fundamental beliefs.

The gap between what a company says it stands for and what actually drives daily decisions creates a significant source of lost potential for any organization. All organizations pursue a purpose. Yet, lofty mission statements are often subverted by the decisions made for short-term crisis management. Value statements are often discredited by how people are treated day to day. Strategies are often abandoned as unexpected events threaten the numbers attached to budgets, bonuses, or personal performance targets.

If you aren't fighting for something bigger than yourself, you'll be nothing more than just one more ambitious, opportunistic asshole who's trying to claw his way to the top. Personal ambition may motivate you, but it's not going to motivate anyone to follow you. Being a warrior and a leader is not about achieving personal success. Success usually does come to leaders, but to a real leader, personal success is just a secondary gain - a nice payoff, but not the real prize. The real prize is achieving the victory of a great principle, like freedom, or peace, or the prosperity of the many.

Therefore, a real leader is actually a servant. He's the servant of a great cause.

You need a performance/values matrix. Jeff Immelt says it very well: Performance, performance, and values. Without performance - I mean, that's what the game is about. But it's got to be values helping you to perform. Self-absorbed learning is different from taking my learning and feeling a sense of responsibility to bring it to you.

All of business is about values, all of the time. Notwithstanding the ostentatious use of stopwatches, Taylor's pig iron case was not a description of some aspect of physical reality--how many tons can a worker lift? It was a prescription--how many tons should a worker lift? The real issue at stake in Mayo's telephone factory was not factual--how can we best establish a sense of teamwork? It was moral-how much of a worker's sense of identity and well-being does a business have a right to harness for its purposes?

The clash between principles and pragmatism is one of the hardest tests of a leader's character. Of course we want our leaders to be both principled and pragmatic. Principles alone qualify men and women to be preachers or saints. Pure pragmatists can open their tool kits and get down to work, but their amorality makes them dangerous. As many leaders know, sometimes the worst conflict is between two strongly held principles. Navigating that can be harder than trying to keep a balance between principles and pragmatism.

Confronting doubt involves coming to terms with differences in values. How does one choose between two valued objectives: safety versus liberty, scientific discovery versus the sanctity of human life, individuals versus groups? Sometimes we overcome doubt with faith, sometimes we privilege one set of values over another. And sometimes we just live with the burden of making choices when there are no easy answers.

Values, by definition, are virtuous, noble benchmarks for behavior. You would be hard pressed to find two groups that disagreed with each other's value statements. True cultural integration, however, requires a focus on both organizations' actual behaviors-not on rhetoric surrounding their conceptual values.

Identity is composed of three primary components that can be viewed as the brain's core subsystems - emotions, values and intellect.

Leaders function at their best - when they are consistent in their values, actions and words, and therefore, trust is high - when they are aware of their emotions and maintain a balance between emotions, values and the intellect, and when values are the leading subsystem in identity. When emotions remain outside of awareness, they - along with intellect - tend to drive the identity system. Behaviours that are inconsistent because they are emotionally driven are often rationalized, and it becomes difficult to have values that remain consistent. The result is that words and actions tend to be inconsistent and serve only the individual, who has little empathy or regard for others. The primary by-product is a decrease in open, honest communication, which over time, tends to lead to distrust.

When values are the driver - overriding both emotional reactivity and intellectual rationalization - words and actions become consistent, creating attitudes and behaviours that foster open, honest communication. This consistent communication in turn creates trusting relationships.

I believe that because of the acceleration of technology, consumers will make a purchase decision based not just on what you sell, but on what you stand for. I'm not talking about morals -- morals are arguments that no one wins. But values are great connectors.

People get confused between purpose, mission statements, and vision. "Mission" is basically how you execute your purpose, and vision is a statement of how you see the world after you've done your purpose and mission.

But purpose is the deepest river: You start with "What difference are you trying to make?" Your tactics will change, your ads will change, your mission might too, but your purpose never will.

When no clear moral purpose is articulated, a company acquires a de facto amoral purpose: expediency. It becomes the kind of company that professes, "We are here only to make money." This can be very successful in the short run, but companies without a clear moral purpose cannot endure; they do not survive the changes they will face in their markets or business environments. Even so, this type of company is preferable to the company that pretends to follow a moral purpose, such as excellence or altruism, but actually practices expediency. This gap between real and professed moral purpose breeds cynicism among employees. Companies that profess moral purpose but do not display it become crisis-ridden and paralyzed, precisely because employees have inconsistent, even contradictory, guidance for their decisions and cannot set priorities.

Principles should not be confused with values. Principles describe how things are and how they work, whereas values state where we aim to go. If principles are the territory, then values are maps. Only when we value correct principles, do we have "a knowledge of things as they are." Practices are helpful in formalizing how to do things, but whereas "practices are situationally specific, principles are deep, fundamental truths that have universal application."